Between the Presidency and Him

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By Kevin Young

Nov. 3, 2017

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER An American TragedyBy Ta-Nehisi Coates 367 pp. One World. $28.

There have always been black presidents of the United States. That’s true whether we’re talking about the work of the historian J. A. Rogers, who in 1965 published “The Five Negro Presidents: According to What White People Said They Were”; or whether we mean the work of our finest comedians like Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, whose sketches imagining a black president satirized not so much the man himself as the racism that had prevented the dream of one. Then there’s the actor Morgan Freeman, who has portrayed not just the president but God with that lush voice of his. He maketh all things possible.

But even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as “black” could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. As Ta-Nehisi Coates charts over and over again in the essays found in “We Were Eight Years in Power,” the price of that ticket has been a steady and at times surprising backlash, resulting in what Coates ultimately and provocatively calls “America’s first white president” in Donald Trump. If “the improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic,” now Coates means to give us what he calls “an American tragedy.” His account presides over not just a change in the nation but changing notions of citizenry, legitimacy and even hope. With some quarters seeing the 2008 election less as a promise than as a threat, Obama’s achievement proves to be both a milestone and a millstone.

The same might be said of Coates’s ascension as an important critic, if not the important critic, of our time. To his credit, Coates has sidestepped the old “one-at-a-time” trap used to pit black geniuses against one another, as well as the ever-present pressure to be the go-to expert on blackness after the runaway success of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.” His reach has proved impressive: Coates, the son of a former Black Panther, went on to reinvent the comic book Black Panther, making him the envy of “blerds” everywhere.

But it is James Baldwin more than anyone who appears as a lodestone here. Coates even moved for a time to France, as Baldwin did, and Coates’s expatriate distance only sharpened his view of the goings-on at home. Of Baldwin, Coates writes powerfully: “Baldwin’s beauty — like all real beauty — is not style apart from substance but indivisible from it. It is not the icing on the cake but the eggs within it, giving it texture, color and shape.”

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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times

“Eight Years” could have settled for being the obligatory miscellany that too often follows a writer’s masterpiece; instead, the book provides a master class on the essay form. Structured as a call and response between eight of his most significant articles and briefer, more personal essays arranged by year, Coates gives us something between a mixtape and a Künstlerroman, demonstrating how he came to dominate the nonfiction genre. Even without the framing of the lively if clipped “this is what I was doing that year” portions, we can see Coates’s growing power and prowess from the progression of the pieces themselves. Picking up steam with “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” from February 2012, Coates is in full command by the time we reach “Fear of a Black President,” an essay that captures the Obama that many are nostalgic for and others continue to rage against.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Coates offers a cleareyed assessment of the racism that limited what the 44th president could say. After the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Coates reminds us, the initial popular reaction was mournful and respectful — it was only after Obama offered the mildest of identifications with the dead child (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”) that negative responses flooded the airways. White people posted pictures of themselves “Trayvoning”: wearing hoodies and pretending to be dead with a package of Skittles. Rather than ushering in a post-racial paradise, Coates writes, the election of Obama became a rallying cry for racists and “effectively racialized white Americans’ views, even of health care policy.” The fear has now become a formula, and “Fear of a Black President,” which was published in the fall of 2012, now feels like both prophecy and jeremiad. (A small criticism: The book doesn’t clearly provide these original publication dates in the text itself, making the exact timing hard to parse.)

In Coates’s essays from the early years of the Obama administration, he regularly identifies a conservatism that black culture often aligns with but that outsiders find hard to name. There is, in fact, another unrealized book here, one in which Coates would have traced this tradition as he started to in an early essay on Bill Cosby. Thankfully he didn’t — instead, the prologues introducing each year often serve as retrospectives, letting him amend the record; with Cosby, Coates says he should have made more of “the torrent of rape allegations that swirled around him even then,” missing a chance to point out the hypocrisy of Cosby’s moralizing “call-outs” about the black community. Coates senses a strain of “the organic black conservative tradition” in both Malcolm X and Obama, calling the former president “a conservative revolutionary” and comparing him to Booker T. Washington. This feels a bit too simplistic. In reality Obama complicates any genealogy of radicals or reactionaries, just as Coates rewrites the narrative of being a public intellectual.

At the start of Coates’s own “two terms,” he is writing in Harlem while living check to check, hoping to give his young family stability; by the following year, he has been invited to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival. The leap seems both unexplained and now inevitable, with the book’s episodic form letting Coates gloss over such gaps. Still, the emotional journey he does detail feels real, and realized. “It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper,” he writes in “Notes From the Eighth Year.” “I suspect, though I do not know, that the lack of both ceilings and safety nets is how we got a black president. I suspect it is how, at least for these eight years, I came to thrive.”

Always passionate, the essays grow increasingly precise. With “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” Coates found not so much his subject as a language for it. He starts to quote historians to show where we’ve been; makes regular reference to Reconstruction and the regression and receding of the American dream; invokes the demonization of “super-predators” and Sister Souljah — all with elegance and insight. His is one of the chorus of voices (following, I’d argue, those of our poets) critiquing not only American nostalgia, both black and white, but the very notion of progress.

It is the record of his struggle as a writer that is of great interest here. As in Baldwin, the struggle of the writing dovetails with the struggle of the race. This becomes clearest in his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” which became Coates’s calling card, and rightly so: It provides a remarkable pocket history of the financial toll of white supremacy, from disenfranchisement to land grabs to redlining, offering a harrowing account of the economic injustices imposed on African-Americans. Framed by one man’s moving from Mississippi to Chicago during the Great Migration only to encounter the same-old systematic shafting in what we used to call “Up South,” it isn’t cross-burning but the slow burn of oppression that makes the blood boil. Compelling and compulsory, “The Case for Reparations” is as convincing in its restraint and pacing as it is in its depth of research and recognition of black humanity. Even if readers don’t see their own families, as I did, in the tales of the Federal Housing Administration’s discriminatory practices or the “kleptocracy” of black-owned land “taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism,” we can see the forms of injustice that persist and speak to basic rights: Where can one live? Indeed, who gets to live?

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates points out. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He also highlights the effect of racist policies on the polity — and just how “plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient,” affecting everything from subprime mortgages to mandatory minimum sentencing. This story is now one that others are telling more fully — books like Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning” help detail the history of reactions to and restrictions of black advances — yet few have done it more succinctly than Coates, or with more power: “What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.”

Obama remains an important foil for Coates, one he fruitfully returns to with “My President Was Black,” a feature begun before the 2016 election (and published after) that shows Coates’s new status — he is now a regular enough White House visitor that he scores an extensive interview — while foreshadowing the ways both men underestimated the opposition, if for different reasons. To Coates, and to many, Obama “became a symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness”; but where Obama’s blindness to Trump’s electoral victory stems, Coates believes, from Obama’s essential optimism, for Coates, any unseeing came from a well-earned pessimism: “I was shocked at my own shock.”

The election of President Obama inspired not only Coates but, as he points out, “a crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms.” The undeniable black renaissance in poetry and cinema, from documentaries like “I Am Not Your Negro” to horror films like “Get Out,” has been met by fellow adventurers in the essay, from Teju Cole to Jesmyn Ward to Kiese Laymon to Roxane Gay. Obama also embodies a phrase that might serve as an alternative subtitle of “Eight Years,” since it appears so often: Being Twice as Good. This phrase is simultaneously the injunction black families have had to give their progeny in a world redlined against them, while also being the very idea that Coates examines as an unjust “double standard.” It is this double standard, he argues, that brought about President Trump: “Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive — work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.”

As Coates turns the heat lower, his brilliance cooks more evenly — and more urgently. Never is this more true than in “The First White President,” his recent cover story for the Atlantic. The essay, presented here as an epilogue, manages to be as bloodless as it is blistering. Coates rebukes those on the left who try to pawn Trump off “as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning.” To Coates, Trump’s “ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power”; to pretend otherwise is to treat “white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else.”

If there’s anything to critique in Coates, it is that for him black autobiography — the story black folks tell themselves and sometimes others — is chiefly trauma. There is another, blues-based tradition, embodied by the likes of the poet Lucille Clifton or Zora Neale Hurston — an ethos that is often as Southern, countrified and womanist as Coates’s vision is Northern, urban and male — which, while forgoing easy optimism, sees black life as a secret pleasure, or at least sees joy, however hard-earned, as “an act of resistance.” (The depiction of joy is from the poet Toi Derricotte; Clifton used to inscribe her books with “Joy!,” which I always took not as balm but challenge.) Coates means to address this when he says that black cultural identity offers “the balm for such trauma,” yet he insists “it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity.” Hurston would offer something else: “Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Her declaration, suffused with a blues aesthetic, even rhymes.

For Coates, his tragic view is usefully defiant: “Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me.” Coates’s book brings us to a boil, then lets us simmer, and anyone who wants to know who we are — and where we are now — must sit with him for a good while. “Eight Years” confirms why Coates is enjoying his extended moment, while also pulling back the curtain on all the hard work that preceded and produced his success. It should inspire us as writers, and as Americans, that he urges us, in exile or online, to become better — or at least clearer on why we’re not.

Correction:

An earlier version of this review misspelled the name of a music artist. She is Sister Souljah, not Sistah Souljah.

Kevin Young, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, is the author of “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.”